Skip to main content

Lost Cause

Schooling the World was made a decade ago and it completely relevant even today - if anything even more so. In that time, I lost half a dozen family elders who grew up a different way, had values different from mine and were part of the organism that was their community. The notion of "I" was ill-formed for them at best. There was no question about doing what it took to support younger siblings and aging parents. If someone from the village came around, they were supported until they were able to land on their feet. These folks had lost their way of life and livelihood through the partition of India in 1947 but they had not given up on their values yet. 

That took a couple of more generations, the nuclearization of the family and western schooling to get there. Today, my generation of the family has very limited connection to each other and what little we do is staged and managed on social media like an interpretive performance. Being that I have no presence there, puts me out of the discussion for the most part. I am clinging to the few strands of real human relationships that are still left - with my uncles and aunts. 

The are two great aunts left in the extended family both in pretty bad physical health. They bounce between hospital and home as their kids try to eke out more time in what's left of their frayed lives. The light is gone, there is nothing to talk about with them anymore. Their end of life did not at all turn out like that of their older siblings that died many decades ago. Back then, family was bigger, someone was always around, care was mostly palliative and no one tried extra hard to fight for another month or year. The end came naturally and everyone was prepared for it. 

Today thanks to the "better" western schooling that the kids and grand-kids have received, the ties to the roots are tenuous at best, understanding of culture and religion shaky and the priorities completely different. Everyone is out there trying to succeed, make more and live better. There is no time for introspection. Since we can't really be there for our elderly parents and integrate them fully into our lives like previous generations did, we absolve our guilt by paying the medical system to pull all manner of stunts to prolong their lives. We have decided to throw money at the problem because that is all we are capable of doing.

I am just as guilty as the rest and have not raised my kid in the tradition of my ancestors because I was neither well-versed in that are nor understood why that was important. Within the span of just two generations of western schooling in my own family, we have managed to fully destroy what it meant to be people from my ancestral village in Bangladesh who lived their lives a certain way for many hundred years that we have record of. I have become a nowhere person myself and have raised a child to be even more disconnected from her roots than I was.
Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Cheese Making

I never fail to remind J that there is a time and place for everything. It is possibly the line she will remember me by when I am dead and gone given how frequently she hears it. Instead of having her breakfast she will break into a song and dance number from High School Musical well past eight on Monday morning. She will insist that I watch and applaud the performance instead of screaming at her to finish her milk and cereal. Her sense of occasion is seriously lacking but then so is mine. Consider for example, a person walks into the grocery store with the express purpose of buying detergent because they are fresh out of it and laundry is only half way done. However instead of heading straight for detergent, they wander over to the natural foods aisle and go berserk upon finding goat milk on sale for a dollar a gallon. They at once proceed to stock pile so they can turn it to huge quantities home-made feta cheese. That person would be me. It would not concern me in the least that I ha...
5 comments
Read more

Part Liberated Woman

An expat desi friend and I were discussing what it means to return to India when you have cobbled together a life in a foreign country no matter how flawed and imperfect. We have both spent over a decade outside India and have kids who were born abroad and have spent very little time back home. Returning "home" is something a lot of new immigrants like L and myself think about. We want very much for that to be an option because a full assimilation into our country of domicile is likely never going to happen. L has visited India more often than I have and has a much better pulse on what's going on there. For me the strongest drag force working against my desire to return home is my experience of life as a woman in India. I neither want to live that suffocatingly sheltered existence myself nor subject J to it. The freedom, independence and safety I have had in here in suburban America was not even something I knew I could expect to have in India. I never knew what it felt t...
111 comments
Read more

Under Advisement

Recently a desi dude who is more acquaintance less friend called to check in on me. Those who have read this blog before might know that such calls tend to make me anxious. Depending on how far back we go, there are sets of FAQs that I brace myself to answer. The trick is to be sufficiently evasive without being downright offensive - a fine balancing act given the provocative nature of questions involved. I look at these calls as opportunities for building patience and tolerance both of which I seriously lack. Basically, they are very desirous of finding out how I am doing in my personal and professional life to be sure that they have me correctly categorized and filed for future reference. The major buckets appear to be loser, struggling, average, arrived, superstar and uncategorizable. My goal needless to say, is to be in the last bucket - the unknown, unquantifiable and therefore uninteresting entity. Their aim is to pull me into something more tangible. So anyways, the dude in ques...
6 comments
Read more